He Called Me Naive and It Stuck

It was one word and the man who said it has been dead for four years and has no idea.

Tom was thirty-three. He had said something in a meeting, not grandly, about wanting two things to be one thing again, and afterward in the car park a man he had looked up to since he was a teenager put a hand on his arm and said, warmly and without malice:

You are a good lad, Tom. You are also very naive.

That was it. There was no second sentence. He said something else about the weather and got in his car.

Tom is forty-four now.

And he has heard that word in his own head perhaps a thousand times since, always in that man's voice, always warm, always on the way home from something.

It did not stop him believing it. That is the part he has to keep explaining to himself. He still wants what he wanted in that meeting and he would still argue for it in his own kitchen.

What it stopped was the saying.

He has not put it in a room since. Eleven years of meetings and conversations and one particular Tuesday two years ago when he could have said the thing and did not, and every single time the reason is one word, delivered kindly, by a man who probably forgot it before he got out of the car park.

And what has happened underneath eleven years of not saying it is that Tom has quietly started to wonder whether the man was right.

Not about the thing itself. About him. Whether he is somebody who has a naive kind of hope in him, and whether that is a defect he should manage, and whether the men who never say it in rooms are the ones who understand how the world works.

He is not bitter. He would have gone to that man for advice about anything and he went to his funeral.

And you may have your own word. Yours may have been sharper or softer, and the person may be gone, and you may still be hearing it in their voice on the way home from things.

The night before He died, this is what He asked for

Take this off before anything else, because you have carried it for eleven years and it was never yours.

You are not naive for wanting it. You never were. Scripture records the Lord Himself asking for exactly this on the last night He had, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the temperature of a room, who decides what is realistic. Set it down here in the car park. It is heavy and it has been in the car with you since you were thirty-three.

Now hear what He prays, and hear when He prays it.

It is the last evening. He has hours. He is praying out loud in front of them and He has already covered protection and joy and being kept from evil, and then He asks for this, and His Spirit had it written down for people exactly like you.

That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.John 17:21

That all of them may be one.

That is not a young man's optimism in a meeting. That is the deliberate request of the most clear-eyed person who has ever lived, made on the night He was betrayed, about people He had just told would scatter within hours.

He knew exactly what they were. He asked anyway.

Which means the wanting is not a defect to be managed out of you. It is the thing He asked for out loud with hours to go, and that stands written, and His Spirit is the one who carries it, and He has never once called anybody naive for wanting what Christ prayed for.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says the man in the car park was a cynic or that he meant you harm. He did not. He put his hand on your arm and he called you a good lad in the same breath, and he had probably watched three things fail that you never heard about, and Scripture does not need him to be a villain in this.

And nothing here says everybody who has never said it in a room is a coward. Some of them are wiser than you about their own rooms, and some of them have said it before and paid for it.

The point is only that one word did eleven years of work, and Scripture puts the same wanting in the mouth of Christ on His last night, and His Spirit is the one who put it in you.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. What has actually been damaged is not your belief.

It is your permission. You still want it, exactly as much, and you have simply stopped believing you are allowed to say so, and a man who wants something for eleven years without saying it out loud starts to wonder if there is something wrong with him for wanting. His Spirit has heard every unsaid sentence.